Summer 2018 I am invited to be the Artist-In-Residence at Alpineum Produzentengalerie in Lucerne Switzerland. I will be able to use the entire gallery as my studio for one month and then host an open studio for the public at the end of the stay. Looking forward to breathe the fresh air and be close to the fantastic landscape of the Swiss Alps, also to be with the creative community in Lucerne. I have many projects in mind to work on with this precious window of time!

I am happy to announce that I am participating in the citywide effort called CPS Lives. CPS is "Chicago Public Schools" and the school I have chosen to work with is the Roberto Clemente Community Academy located in my neighborhood (where I have lived on and off for over 20 years). This urban high school is a bridge between the 'hood and a brighter future for students and parents too. Their facilities are a modern Miesian building and a sports complex. Stay tuned for the results of this ongoing engagement:

Schneider Gallery is pleased to showcase the second part to our two-part group exhibition of experimental photography. Part II features work by Alison Carey, Doug Fogelson, Bryan Hiott and Accra Shepp. The artists in this exhibition explore a diverse scope of approaches to photography, employing non-traditional materials and historical processes.

Alison Carey’s photographic constructs are influenced by biology and paleontology, natural history, and the geology of our earth and moon. Her series, In Memoriam, recontextualizes taxidermied creatures from the Field Museum of Natural History by placing them into newly constructed dioramas. The photographs are a homage to these animals for their contribution to scientific study and for serving their afterlives as specimens on public display.

The photographs in Doug Fogelson’s series Chemical Alterations explore the natural world and the impact of climate change, ecocide and extinction by directly altering the film’s surface with industrial chemicals. The destruction of the image symbolically points to humankind’s relationship to the environment while also referencing the photographic medium itself.

Bryan Hiott’s wet plate collodion portraits create moments of stillness in which the subject reveals something beyond surface appearance. To sit for a portrait in this process is to engage in a dialogue between the present and the past, between what is hidden and what is revealed.

In his new body of work inspired by a residency in Italy, Accra Shepp explores the relationship between the past and present through two and three panel contact prints using the cyanotype process. Dating back to the 1840’s, the cyanotype’s signature intense blue forces a shift in how we understand the images while simultaneously linking us to our past.

I am quite stoked to have one of my color photograms from the "Forms & Records" series accompanying an article in Harper's Magazine's New Books section about the title, "Parental Discretion is Advised: The Rise of N.W.A. and the Dawn of Gangsta Rap" by Gerrick D. Kennedy. Check out the review here:

The Poetry Foundation commissioned a frontispiece for their Poems of Jewish Faith and Culture section. I used the circle as a motif and made this multiple exposure color photogram one day close to the time of the solar eclipse. The piece is titled for the Torah portion from that week which is "Re' eh", which means "to see"- another of the chance based elements at work in this process.

Very excited to have a piece in re:collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago! Here are some images, much better go see the whole show as it has some great works across multiple spaces in the museum:

Another fine release on cassette from the label Love All Day and my images were inside & out.

Bucket Brigade – Mnemosyne

Cat #: LAD 013 — Year: 2017 — Format: Cassette

Second release from Chicago artist Jacob Kart’s Bucket Brigade project, in which Kart sets up situations via a Eurorack modular synthesizer to manipulate degrees of randomness into fully realized compositions. A mainstay of Chicago’s improvising scene, Kart eschews overdubs on the recording, treating the machine as another intelligence or living organism whose spontaneous emissions can be played off of and interacted with. Though extremely pleasant to listen to, there’s a kind of edge-of-your-seat tension throughout most of these pieces that is located precisely where the pure waves, pattern inducing patches, and cellular logic of the machine meets the intelligence & in-the-moment reactions of an improvising composer. One is reminded of nothing less than the final outcome of one of artist Sol Lewitt’s famous process & system based artworks, in which predetermined outcomes have nevertheless been graced by the vagaries of human intellect & ability.

Happy to share that I have new work in the Midwest Photographers Project (MPP) at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Here's a link to the web version with eloquent words by Allison Grant. Go see the prints (many more in the box than what is displayed online) and works from many great Midwestern artists at the MPP @ MOCP sometime in person.

Sonnenzimmer, the Chicago based art practice and studio of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi, was commissioned to further explore, through planar interventions, the destruction of my photographs from the Chemical Alterations series.

I am thrilled to be featured on Collier Brown and 21st Editions The Od Review blog!

Here is an excerpt:

“And while I know the best results are usually found in the tension between representation and abstraction, my mind is still pulled toward complete obliteration,” says Doug Fogelson.

Fogelson’s reflections recall for me a line from Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” where death “strews the leaves / of sure obliteration on our paths,” and yet, she “makes the willows shiver in the sun / For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze / Upon the grass.”

I’m no maiden, alas—but do I sit and gaze at these photographs as if they were willows shivering in the sun? Yes I do. Yes I did. Yes I will.